The Association of Professional Futurists is delighted to announce the winners and honourable mentions of the 2025 APF IF Awards. Representing Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania, the honourees showcase some of the most compelling and leading-edge work shaping the futures and foresight field today. This awards cycle reflects the remarkable and continued broadening of the discipline, with entries spanning experiential, participatory, and systems-based approaches. This year, in a deep field full of outstanding, thought-provoking, creative, and surprising entries, there were 10 winners and 4 honourable mentions.
The winning projects explore a powerful spectrum of themes, including urbanisation and nature, transforming trend analysis into living systems, digital health systems, animal wellbeing, and resilient digital strategies for agricultural communities. Other initiatives focus on better decision-making and sensemaking, security media futures, and governance in the Global South. From games that make an introduction to strategic foresight into play, to global youth projects, futures and foresight is expanding — and the APF IF Awards are where some of its boldest innovators shine.
We are deeply grateful for the generosity and wisdom of the APF IF Awards judges, who are APF Professional Members, or experts in adjacent fields. Each recognized entry received consideration by twelve judges, making this set of award-winning projects a robust and significant collection of futures and foresight work released between 2023 and mid-2025.
Read more about the winning entries below. Winning entries are organized alphabetically by work titles.
APF IF AWARDS 2025
8 categories
The purpose of the IF Award key categories are to broaden from the academic constraints and the format descriptor, highlight the values of APF, and reflect our values about recognized awardees.
Advancement in the Field
Advancements in methodologies, tools, and practices that demonstrate noteworthy changes, developments, and improvements in the field.
Systems Approaches
Creates understanding using lenses, approaches, and/or practices that put systems, complexity, or holistic thinking at the center.
Deep Past, Deep Futures
Works that promote long-term thinking, intergenerational and/or endogenous approaches, ancestral or pre-Industrial concepts, practice and knowledge; and/or orient towards reconciliation with historically and systematically marginalized groups.
Novel Images of the Future
Robust, deeply researched and realized new images of the future that engender broader imagination, new possibilities, and/or radical optimism.
Experiential Futures
Works that blend the form and function of futures work through design-based, multi-sensorial, experiential and/or play-driven
approaches that employ non-traditional means (including but not limited to literary, podcast, gaming, musical, or other forms and expressions) to explore and engender futures thinking.
Building Futures Bridges
Futures and foresight that builds bridges, leveraging multinational, regional, or global engagement, and/or is the product of
unexpected collaborations or partnerships.
Practice and Applications
Showcases work that clearly demonstrates where futures and foresight were integral to a process and/or practice within a
community, corporate, agency, and governance context to deliver outcomes, effects, and impact.
Participatory Futures
Utilizes participatory futures approaches and practices to create governance, dialogues, change, and/or enhance access to, engagement with, or ownership of futures and foresight for nontraditional clients, cultures, communities, and/or populations.
Description of The Work
Arcadia is an educational board game that introduces young people to the principles of strategic foresight through the lens of people-centered justice. By simulating policy-making, players collaborate to shape a desirable future city for a diverse set of stakeholders, each carrying different levels of power and vulnerability. The game’s cooperative mechanics challenge players to negotiate the shared goal of making a liveable city and to weigh the consequences of their decisions. A dynamic point system reflects how their choices can either reinforce systemic inequities or create pathways toward more just futures. After gameplay, participants engage in speculative storytelling and visual exercises to imagine the future cities they’ve helped shape.
Description of The Work
BROKEN was an interactive, narrative-driven exhibition at MOD. from Jan–Nov 2024, designed to explore a range of possible alternative systems and build visitors’ capability to imagine hopeful futures. Each gallery posed a “What if?” provocation to explore a system that could be an alternative to our present. BROKEN was conceived after participatory dialogues with young people about their concerns on issues shaping the future. Conversations highlighted a sense of "brokenness" across challenges like the housing crisis, fragmented media and the education system. 31 researchers helped create BROKEN to provide a platform for exploring systemic issues contributing to feelings of disempowerment. BROKEN integrated research on hope theory, a novel approach that fostered a sense of optimism and possibility.
*Supported by the School of International Futures through the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship.
Description of The Work
Designing Futures for Governance in the Global South is a free, collaborative learning initiative that trained 50 participants from governments and social organizations across seven countries. It combined 8 hours of asynchronous theory with five live workshops to build strategic foresight and futures design skills. Centered on UNESCO’s 2024 Declaration for Future Generations, participants developed strategies for desirable futures using tools like signal mapping, scenario building, and speculative narratives. The project resulted in a free publication and toolkit, available in Portuguese (PDF and Miro), to support broader use. It promotes inclusive, anticipatory governance shaped by and for the Global South.
Description of The Work
Digital Transition Toolkit empowers policy-makers to co-create resilient digital strategies for agriculture and rural communities. Packaged as a deck of cards, it includes concept prompts to shape visions, activity cards to map enablers, scenario cards to stress-test objectives, and summary templates to capture insights. By turning formal meetings into informal, multi-sensory workshops, it lowers barriers, diffuses tensions, and sparks dialogue. Fully modular, it adapts from 2-hour sessions to full-day retreats. Combining participatory card-based facilitation with systems thinking, the Toolkit grounds strategies in shared values and real-world constraints, helping policy-makers anticipate uncertainty, align stakeholders, and drive inclusive digital agendas across agrifood systems.
Description of The Work
What if trend analysis wasn’t a static report, but a living system that described dilemmas as people actually experience them? What if it integrated a scaffold that helped organisations think, act and adapt together? This project reimagined workforce futures through four innovations: hypothesis-driven scanning using intelligence tradecraft, archetypes and AI; an analysis framework blending complexity theory, narrative foresight and AI to reveal story systems and name the tensions shaping change; an interactive digital artefact with GPT-powered tools and an AI-hosted podcast and a So What, Now What workshop series that turned insight into action. The result: real-immediate impact, not foresight theatre. A living infrastructure embedded in strategic decision making for teams under pressure.
Description of The Work
We developed a futures technique, called ‘Future.Ctrl’, combining (i) futures thinking, (ii) quantitative forecasting and (iii) decision making. In a novel six-step methodology we used SuperforecastersⓇ from Good Judgment Inc to forecast the probability of scenario-based events via forecasting questions. We then established a framework for decision makers to select actions if a forecasted probability exceeded a threshold (e.g. 50% likelihood by 2050). This enables decision makers to (1) pre-agree actions before a threshold has been passed; (2) move quickly when crisis hits; (3) ready delivery partners; and (4) make better choices during ‘steady state’ moments. Decision makers gain understanding of their futures over a time horizon, quantitative probability data and a course of action.
Description of The Work
Futures Health CoLab is a pan-African participatory foresight initiative empowering youth to shape digital health governance. Between 2023 and 2025, we organized five workshops in Nairobi, Accra, Dakar, Kampala and Johannesburg, engaging 120 youth advocates, technologists, policymakers and community leaders each. Through scenario-building, storytelling and rapid prototyping, participants tackled privacy gaps, exclusionary design and algorithmic bias to craft transparent, inclusive solutions. Our open-source Youth Data Charter defines equitable data rights and responsibilities. We released a policy toolkit and three prototypes: a community data portal, a mobile consent interface and an AI-powered maternal health feedback loop. These resources informed national consultations in Kenya and Ghana. Centering lived experience, CoLab built a network of 600 youth futurists across 12 countries who continue to drive policy change and bridge grassroots innovation with formal decision-making. Winning this award will allow us to expand workshops and translate our toolkit into additional languages. We have trained 45 future facilitators who lead local workshops and maintain feedback loops with policymakers. Plans include launching a mentorship program and annual summit to sustain momentum. By deepening partnerships and scaling our model, we aim to seed new CoLab chapters across Africa and beyond, ensuring young voices drive health systems globally.
Description of The Work
As urbanization rises, our connection to nature—a vital source of belonging—diminishes, making it harder to imagine a flourishing future. Futuring with Nature bridges this gap by fostering intergenerational dialogue and exploring possible futures with nature. Through fully outdoor workshops, communities engage with seasonal change, nature, and artmaking. Participants learn futures thinking concepts—like signals of change and trends—in accessible ways across ages. Observing subtle shifts in nature, they identify near (fall), mid (winter), and far (future seasons) signals, grounded in the present (summer). A final collaborative art project helps draw meaning from these insights. The program strengthens bonds between people, place, and planet.
Description of The Work
I created and piloted the Integration Framework, a sensemaking tool for organizations navigating transition, disruption, or milestone moments. Unlike traditional retrospectives, it creates a layered, directional map that helps teams surface misalignments, spot blind spots, trace success paths, and realign with clarity. Blending narrative, systems thinking, and strategic foresight, it guides teams to “time-travel” across decisions, beliefs, and external shifts. The process uses four lenses and transitions to integrate timelines, domains, and perspectives into a unified strategic view.
Description of The Work
Alien life -the goal of astrobiology- bears the mark of the monster, as it can easily tap into particular leitmotifs of the monstrous that are largely constant across cultures. This foreshadows a risk of monsterization of the parties involved in a future discovery. This can adversely affect moral appraisals in future encounters with alien life by rendering theoretical ethical approaches ineffective, as monsters are not only always outside the moral order but defy and transgress it. Grounded on moral imagination and anticipation and drawing on the inherent educational power of monsters, this chapter offers a theoretical exploration and a novel futures literacy workshop for students, to help pre-emptively decrease the potential for the monsterization of humans and alien life in the case of a future discovery.
Description of The Work
Plague Season is a found-object representation of participatory speculative futures work concerning disasters and irrevocable social change. The object looks back at plagues past (five years since Covid-19 lockdowns) and forward to plagues future. The ultimate question is: what do we need to hold onto the essence of ourselves when the entire world around us changes? Using data elicited from a whimsical, imaginative co-creation process conducted through spring 2025, the work includes an elegiac short story bringing rich sensory detail to people's resilience talismans through imagined disasters, brief scenarios outlining several possible futures based on disaster combinations including links to how these signals are emerging now, and a facilitators’ how-to guide for running the participatory process.
Description of The Work
What is the Future of Security Media?
The scope centred on a 5-day Lab for Sharjah Police on the 2040 futures of security media, delivered via an eight-stage foresight+ process, including foresight training for 40 participants.
The program included three weeks of pre-Lab investigation to create deep-dive presentations, customized exercises and interviews conducted by the Head of Futures Foresight, Capt. Houria Alzarouni, with 60+ employees from Police Media Department and external experts to glean insights into challenges, success factors, best practices related to changing media and crime.
A key goal of the Lab was to develop projects with immediate, detailed action plans for each scenario to commence the path towards the 2040 vision.
The Lab delivered 6 robust, fully evaluated scenarios supported by in-depth strategic plans, giving 8 initial projects with implementation plans. All pre- and Lab workings, outcomes, conclusions and recommendations were presented in a 244-page report.
We want to thank the teams at UNICEF country offices in Algeria, Argentina, the Comoros, Egypt, Ghana, Maldives, Mali, Myanmar, Pakistan, Türkiye, the UNICEF National Committee of the United States of America, and the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales for their support of the Fellowship. A special mention to the 12 Youth Foresight Fellows: Oussamaben Mohamed Ali, May Phyu Phyu Aung, Mamadou Doucoure, Rawan El-Bendary, Nahjae Nunes, Joshua Opey, Selin Özgürsoy, Abril Perazzini, Aicha Robei, Kate Seary, Zainab Waheed and Fathmath Zahanath Zuhury.
Description of The Work
The UNICEF Innocenti Youth Foresight Fellowship was created to meaningfully engage adolescents and youth in long-term decisions that impact their lives. In 2023, twelve Fellows with no prior foresight experience led over 50 workshops with 800+ children and youth across 12 countries. Their insights shaped the Young Visionaries Youth Foresight Child Rights Report 2024. Using foresight tools and their knowledge of child rights and advocacy, Fellows co-designed and led national projects in partnership with UNICEF offices. These youth-led processes present findings with implications for national contexts, highlight emerging issues, and include recommendations from children and youth to address risks and seize opportunities.
*This project was commissioned by the the RSPCA as part of their 200th anniversary, and delivered by Henry Lane, Andy Martin, Josh Richardson and Dr Michael Harris from Firetail.
Description of The Work
The Wilberforce Report and Animal Futures Project is a strategic foresight project exploring the future of animal wellbeing to 2050. Commissioned by the RSPCA as part of its 200th anniversary, Firetail developed five scenarios through rigorous methodology. The scenarios examine how climate change, technological progress, and societal responses will shape human-animal relationships, creating four core futures plus one wildcard scenario.
The RSPCA transformed these scenarios into public engagement through an innovative interactive game, enabling citizens to explore different futures and understand how today's choices impact animals in 2050. This catalysed a broader "Animal Futures Project" including citizens' assemblies and strategic repositioning.